Chronicling the ongoing intersectional struggle to liberate women — inclusively defined as the legacy kind and the transgenders — from The Patriarchy™, one microaggression at a time.
Feminist columnist hijacks occasion of Taylor Swift engagement to lodge personal complaint about lack of marriage fulfillment
Why Karens, a very real and unfortunate archetype of liberal white women, feel compelled to capitalize on any opportunity to air their personal grievances in public — while throwing their spouses under the bus, in this case, the man this lady is still married to — I’ll never quite understand.
As far as I’m concerned, unless there’s some significant and newsworthy angle, the only proper response to “some ditzy celebrity got engaged” is “God bless.”
But I guess hot takes move product — and MSNBC needs all the market share it can claim.
Sad!
Via MSNBC (emphasis added):
[Taylor Swift is] about to find out firsthand what many middle-aged married women already know: that many of Swift’s love songs really do paint an impossible picture.
To be sure, romantic love is real. Science believes that it lasts for about two years, tops. And building a life with someone you love can be great, if you’ve chosen the right person. But science has also discovered something else: when it comes to hetero unions, men stand to benefit much more than women do from marriage. And it is widely known that single women are thought to be happier than their married counterparts*…
In many ways, marriage creates more problems than it solves. No one knows that more than, well, people who are married.
*Check out these weasel expressions: ”Widely known that single women are thought to be happier.”
“Widely” known by whom?
“Thought to be happier” or actually happier?
Citations needed.
Related: 'HuffPost Personal' Cancer: A Tragic Tale of One Husband's Total Emasculation
Whereas this lady didn’t reference any actual social science vis-à-vis the relative happiness of married vs. unmarried women (and, as a corollary, conservative vs. liberal women), here’s some via Evie Magazine (emphasis added):
In March 2025, psychologist Jean Twenge teamed up with Jenet Erickson, Wendy Wang, and Brad Wilcox to run a nationally representative YouGov poll of 3,000 women between the ages of 25 and 55. In this survey, 19% of married mothers rated themselves at the highest level of happiness. The numbers were lower for other women: 11% of married women without children, 13% of single mothers, and 10% of unmarried women without children. Married mothers also stood out as the group most likely to say they found life enjoyable most or all of the time. These contrasts remained even once factors like age, income, and education were taken into account…
These findings mirror earlier research. In May 2022, the American Family Survey, also fielded by YouGov, found that women who embrace marriage and motherhood consistently report higher satisfaction with their lives than women without children… 31% of conservative women in that age bracket described themselves as completely satisfied with life, compared with 16% of liberal women.
Related: Poll: Liberal Women Experience Worst Mental Health of All Demographics
The MSNBC Karen selling the “marriage sucks” line, Christina Wyman, a self-described “assertive New Yorker” who looks like this, is keen to emphasize there is “nothing,” “not one thing” “magical about marriage.”
Continuing:
My husband is also an avoidant Midwesterner while I’m an assertive New Yorker. I soon learned that avoidant personalities are all too happy to sweep any and all problems under the rug in the hopes that everyone forgets in the name of peace and harmony. And as we both learned (the hard way), that tactic doesn’t work on someone who’s not afraid of conflict. Our personalities were laid bare, and there was nowhere to hide…
I do not intend to rain on Swift’s parade, but I do wish someone would have been brave enough to sit me down for some real talk about what many married women know firsthand: There’s nothing magical about marriage. Nothing. Not one thing. Even for the happiest couples…
Most of our days together are marked by drudgery, negotiation, mild arguments, odd smells, and tedium — with a healthy dose of mind-numbing irritation that has made me want to throw in the towel more times than I can recall.
Mind you, this prize of a bride is still somehow married, perhaps an indication that her “avoidant Midwestern” husband has simply given up on life.
We’ve all seen the familiar sight: a brokeback cuck, fully demoralized, scarred with henpecks from head to toe, just sort of waiting to be put out of his misery.
Better Call Saul most excellently depicted a married couple like this, the Kettlemans.
